A device or system is known that is designed to read out, from a card with a customer's information recorded thereon such as a membership card, the recorded information and perform information providing according to the recorded information thus read out.
For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. H08-103549 discloses a customer management system that, by providing a customer service using a membership card, is aimed at effectively promoting an improvement of a customer attracting effect and at the same time, preventing an increase in a burden on a game hall due to a job of issuing an exchange ticket (a coupon) that is essential to the customer service.
In the customer management system of Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. H08-103549, an input terminal reads out an ID code capable of identifying a pre-registered customer from the membership card and, if it judges that the membership card is proper, makes a monitor display pre-set information on the customer service. When an operation is performed to receive the customer service as displayed, the input terminal issues by a printer an exchange ticket necessary to receive the customer service and at the same time, sends data on such customer service to a point-of-sale terminal and a host computer.
In the customer management system of Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. H08-103549, the information on the service available to an individual such as a predetermined service member is the information prearranged according to identifying information identifying the service member. In this case, the information provided in response to the identifying information is in a one-to-one relationship with the identifying information and the information provision according to the identifying information is not flexibly changeable.
For example, there is a system that, in providing information to the customer service member, firstly screen-displays a list of information available to the customer service member, etc. and then outputs by printing the information selected out of the displayed menu.
However, even in such a case, the prearranged information is the information arranged in a one-to-one relationship with the identifying information identifying the service member, etc., and it is merely so arranged that a user can select a particular piece of information out of such arranged information. Namely, the above conventional technology discloses no such system as designed to, at the time of providing some information according to the identifying information, offer a high degree of convenience to the user by flexibly changing the information to be provided, in consideration of the conditions in which the information is acquired such as the date and hour of use and the place of use.